In terms of content, holy shit, Brawl is just showing off at this point. Brawl's single-player, the oft-beloved and fondly-remembered Subspace Emissary, is not only a mastercraft of silent, slapsticky storytelling, but the perfect representation of what a kid sees in their head whenever they imagine their favorite characters fighting or teaming up against an all-encompassing force. It's also an incredibly thorough and finely-crafted single-player experience, absolutely loaded with unique and expansive levels of its own that imbue the single player with a sense of adventurous, dynamic gravitas that the other, more sinewy Smash single-player modes simply don't have. Outside of the Subspace Emissary, Brawl has a metric assload of stages compared to the paltry amount of arenas in Melee & 64, a dizzying amount of Stickers, CDs, and Trophies to collect (all of which can be viewed and listened to in separate rooms of their own), an Arcade-style boss rush mode, a weird pinball-Galaga fixed-shooter trophy-collection minigame, Classic Mode, All-Star Mode, Photo Mode, Tourney Mode, and an entire collection of fully-playable demos of retro games, ranging from Ice Climber to F-Zero to Ocarina of Time. You can also make you own custom stages! And there's online multiplayer, too! Like, yeah, the custom stages are pretty hilariously small and don't give you a whole lot to work with, and the Wii's online capabilities and connection rates were notoriously bullshit (especially when it came to Brawl's lobbies), but you have to consider the fact that these options even exist at all.
Brawl feels like a celebration of gaming itself. And it's not just Nintendo games, either - Sonic is finally in this game, a choice that not only shook the industry but compelled the nine-year-old me to buy this game and get into the Smash series as a whole (yes, Brawl was my first Smash games; I was barely learning how to walk and formulate words when Melee came out). Brawl is jam-packed with content and unlockables and reasons to keep coming back to the game, keep playing it. Brawl is a great time with friends and it's a great time on your own - Brawl holds a very special place in a lot of gamers' hearts, yours truly included, in spite of the controversial nature of Brawl to the fighting game community as a whole.
And yes, Brawl is controversial, in spite of all the glowing praise I just gave it, so let's address the elephant in the room. Brawl is a great party game, but Brawl is a terrible competitive fighting game, lmao. The funniest thing about Brawl is that HAL and Sakurai actively introduced elements into Smash to make it more of a casual experience. I mean... tripping! You can just... randomly trip now! Why else, other than to drag this game back into the party-game realm where it belongs, would they include such a jarring feature? But even if we completely ignore the infamous 'tripping' mechanic, Brawl is absolutely broken to its core. Chain-grabbing is so easy that some characters can just use the grab move as an infinite. Numerous characters can fly now, like Charizard, Meta Knight, and Pit. Smash Balls & Final Smashes - another fun new feature! - range from unbelievably busted to hilariously lame. Hitstun is virtually nonexistent and combo-building in this game is practically impossible, turning Brawl into an incredibly floaty experience. The high-tiers of Brawl are intimidating and the low-tiers are fucking pitiable. Olimar's menacing little Pikmin. Diddy Kong's terror-inducing bananas. Meta Knight. META KNIGHT. The entire meta of the game revolves a man with meta in his NAME. The previous games before Brawl were broken and buggy messes, sure, but Brawl is shameless about its fragility as a competitive game. You can almost hear Sakurai laugh every time some stupid new thing was discovered and promptly banned, like Fox's shine-stalling, Dedede's infinite, Meta Knight's scrooging, and hell, sometimes even Meta Knight as a playable character gets banned from tourneys.
But you know what? I don't care. Brawl wears its glitchy heart on its sleeve and I can't help but admire its shameless confidence. It's my secret favorite of the series, not just because of the fact that I actually enjoy how casual, lighthearted, and funny Brawl's mechanics are, but the fact that A.) Brawl's dysfunctional mechanics don't stop it from being an enjoyable casual fighting game in its own right, and B.) Brawl has so much fucking content that it almost felt I was robbing Nintendo for getting this game for only sixty bucks back in the day. Yes, Nintendo, a company notorious for overpricing pretty much all of their games (sixty dollars for EMULATIONS of three 2D Mario games). Brawl was a game with a hundred dollars' worth of content all for the bargain-bin price of sixty dollars, and it's all thanks to HAL ^ and Sakurai himself for their impeccable attention to detail and their love of the craft. As competitively garbage as Brawl actually is, well... Smash was never made to be competitive (at least not at this point in time). So, if anything, Brawl is the truest and purest form of Smash Bros on the market. Whether you like it or not, this is always how Sakurai intended for you to play Smash, and I for one still enjoy it just as much as I did as an impressionable and starry-eyed kid.
^ (Technically this was developed by "Sora LTD" and a few others, but Sora LTD is just a shell company of Sakurai's and HAL Labratory's, so...)
Brawl feels like a celebration of gaming itself. And it's not just Nintendo games, either - Sonic is finally in this game, a choice that not only shook the industry but compelled the nine-year-old me to buy this game and get into the Smash series as a whole (yes, Brawl was my first Smash games; I was barely learning how to walk and formulate words when Melee came out). Brawl is jam-packed with content and unlockables and reasons to keep coming back to the game, keep playing it. Brawl is a great time with friends and it's a great time on your own - Brawl holds a very special place in a lot of gamers' hearts, yours truly included, in spite of the controversial nature of Brawl to the fighting game community as a whole.
And yes, Brawl is controversial, in spite of all the glowing praise I just gave it, so let's address the elephant in the room. Brawl is a great party game, but Brawl is a terrible competitive fighting game, lmao. The funniest thing about Brawl is that HAL and Sakurai actively introduced elements into Smash to make it more of a casual experience. I mean... tripping! You can just... randomly trip now! Why else, other than to drag this game back into the party-game realm where it belongs, would they include such a jarring feature? But even if we completely ignore the infamous 'tripping' mechanic, Brawl is absolutely broken to its core. Chain-grabbing is so easy that some characters can just use the grab move as an infinite. Numerous characters can fly now, like Charizard, Meta Knight, and Pit. Smash Balls & Final Smashes - another fun new feature! - range from unbelievably busted to hilariously lame. Hitstun is virtually nonexistent and combo-building in this game is practically impossible, turning Brawl into an incredibly floaty experience. The high-tiers of Brawl are intimidating and the low-tiers are fucking pitiable. Olimar's menacing little Pikmin. Diddy Kong's terror-inducing bananas. Meta Knight. META KNIGHT. The entire meta of the game revolves a man with meta in his NAME. The previous games before Brawl were broken and buggy messes, sure, but Brawl is shameless about its fragility as a competitive game. You can almost hear Sakurai laugh every time some stupid new thing was discovered and promptly banned, like Fox's shine-stalling, Dedede's infinite, Meta Knight's scrooging, and hell, sometimes even Meta Knight as a playable character gets banned from tourneys.
But you know what? I don't care. Brawl wears its glitchy heart on its sleeve and I can't help but admire its shameless confidence. It's my secret favorite of the series, not just because of the fact that I actually enjoy how casual, lighthearted, and funny Brawl's mechanics are, but the fact that A.) Brawl's dysfunctional mechanics don't stop it from being an enjoyable casual fighting game in its own right, and B.) Brawl has so much fucking content that it almost felt I was robbing Nintendo for getting this game for only sixty bucks back in the day. Yes, Nintendo, a company notorious for overpricing pretty much all of their games (sixty dollars for EMULATIONS of three 2D Mario games). Brawl was a game with a hundred dollars' worth of content all for the bargain-bin price of sixty dollars, and it's all thanks to HAL ^ and Sakurai himself for their impeccable attention to detail and their love of the craft. As competitively garbage as Brawl actually is, well... Smash was never made to be competitive (at least not at this point in time). So, if anything, Brawl is the truest and purest form of Smash Bros on the market. Whether you like it or not, this is always how Sakurai intended for you to play Smash, and I for one still enjoy it just as much as I did as an impressionable and starry-eyed kid.
^ (Technically this was developed by "Sora LTD" and a few others, but Sora LTD is just a shell company of Sakurai's and HAL Labratory's, so...)